Credit: No_Mango7658
Review: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/comments/1palrio/noninfluiencer_50ppd_vs_57ppd_inital_impressions/
Through some fault of my own, I’ve ended up with a Crystal Super 50ppd and 57ppd. Due to technical difficulties that I will gloss over for now, I’ve only got about 30 minutes in each headset before I had to go to work.
I spent the last couple months trying to decide which optical engine to order, this happy mistake has given me a unique opportunity that is generally only available via VR influencers. So, I’ve decided to share my initial impressions and maybe later a full review comparing both engines. I am not an influencer and spend a couple hours per month in VR, mostly flight sims and mini golf with the family.
I put on the 57ppd first and initially I thought that the clarity in the sweet spot was absolutely incredible. Like unbelievable!! No pixels and no aliasing, truly as clear as my desktop monitors. Immediately following that, the blur kills the rest of the excitement. To be fair a lot of people are having problems with the default ipd adjustments and I haven’t done any of the advanced adjusting some people have done to improve edge to edge clarity. I plan to spend some time working with the headset to make it a better experience. I think it’s doable, things just are right with the lense default adjustment. I’ll be applying offsets and trying to fix that. Currently the sweet spot overlap is small, so one eye might see something with perfect clarity but the other eye will be slightly blury. This might be a problem for extended usage. I cannot express enough how amazingly high resolution this headset is. This would probably be ideal for people that don’t need huge fov but want tons of clarity in the sweet spot, especially spotting AC in DCS. I would guess 30% of the center of each lense was perfectly clear, without any bluring or aborations. The edges really aren’t even that bad, but it’s very noticeable when you’re looking for it. Less noticeable when you’re actually gaming. The fov for me is similar or maybe slightly bigger than quest 3 and valve index. Again my lenses need some adjustments in the software for offsets, I think that’ll help a lot and I’ll do a follow up after I spend a week gaming.
50ppd is an overall best choice. The first thing I noticed after using the 57ppd was the sweet spot was enormous compared to the 57ppd. The loss of resolution really wasn’t very noticeable and the 50ppd was generally easier to center my eyes into the much larger sweet spot. I did not measure the fov but it was noticeably bigger than the 57ppd and felt really good. If you need to buy a headset today and you’re having a hard time choosing, I think the 50ppd is the dead simple answer.
If there’s interest I may follow up with a more complete review of the headsets after I get more time with them. I’m happy to answer any specific questions people might have.